Teaching Classification Systems

Today I get the privilege of teaching middle school students the difference between the Dewey Decimal Classification system and the Library of Congress Classification system. I plan on talking about a few basic differences. Dewey uses only numbers and, according to my colleague, is limited to only 100 classes. It seems to me that it has 1000 classes, but I could be mistaken. The Library of Congress has at least 676 classes; with each letter of the alphabet available twice that's 26 times 26, or 676.

In reading Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do, he asserts that the best teachers ask big-picture questions that are meaningful to students. These questions are often multi-disciplinary in nature. With this in mind it seems like a questions like: "What's your world view?" or "How do you look at and organize the world of knowledge?" The best teachers stimulate even more questions, so students leave with more questions than they came with. They do not just dump information off on the students and expect them to memorize it.

How do these classification systems influence our thinking? How do they influence what we find? By arranging books into topics, the user can find a book they like on the shelf in the library and then he or she can browse the shelves around that book. Many criticize both of these systems for being out-of-date with today's society and anglo-saxon oriented. These probably are valid criticisms, but the money involved in starting all over would be very large indeed.

The Library of Congress resembles Thomas Jefferson's collection as he donated his books to the Library of Congress after their library burned in the War of 1812. I intend to show a few websites, such as the following:

• http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/public.htm
  
• http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/default.htm
  
• http://www.oclc.org/dewey/about/default.htm
• http://www.douglas.bc.ca/library/lc.html
• http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/

When I have more time I would like to update this post and talk more about the web sites selected here.